This invention relates to a technique for transmitting digital contents from a server via a network to a user terminal for selling the digital contents.
In recent years, copyrighted articles (copyrighted articles in text, music, art, graphics, movie, photo and so on) fixed to carriable media such as paper media of books, etc., and computer-readable media of CD-ROM, etc., and sold have been put into communicatable form as digital data form and sold through a computer network with the widespread use of computer networks typified by the Internet and improvement of the law infrastructure for regulating electronic commerce through the computer network. The copyrights of such copyrighted articles put into communicatable form as digital data form (which will be hereinafter referred to as digital contents) are easily violated because of the essential feature of digital data that the same articles can be copied completely. Therefore, to provide such digital contents, it is necessary to prevent replication exceeding the licensed range from the copyright holders; on the other hand, it is also necessary to guarantee use of the copyrighted articles by the user in the range. However, if too much importance is put on the copyright holder protection, an excessive burden (forcible disclosure of private information, purchase of unsatisfactory copyrighted article, etc.,) is imposed on information, purchase of unsatisfactory copyrighted article, etc.,) is imposed on the user and consequently the user may be disgusted with purchase of digital contents using the computer network. On the other hand, if too much importance is put on the user protection, room is left for the user to commit illegal use of copyrighted articles (illegal getting by circumventing charging, use exceeding the permitted number of times, use in unauthorized use mode, etc.,) and consequently selling copyrighted articles using the computer network may be circumvented. Therefore, to promote use of such a business model, it is important to bring copyright holder protection and user protection into balance.
By the way, to provide the user with image data for a printer to print copyrighted articles of photo, art, or graphics as the above-described digital contents, the user is allowed to execute various types of print with the image data as material in such a manner that a calendar is added to the image data for printing, that any desired message is added to the image data for printing, etc., if the copyright holder permits. Permission of such arrangement makes it possible to fuel new demands for copyrighted articles and also leads to the profit of the copyright holder if the arrangement is within the scope intended by the copyright holder. A print program for generating a print image passed to a printer driver for a printer in a user terminal also requires not only the above-mentioned image data, but also layout information for defining placement of the image data, text, or a calendar on printed matter as indispensable data for printing.
However, if such layout information is generated on the user terminal and is passed directly to the print program, the possibility of not only layout arrangement, but also alteration exceeding the scope intended by the copyright holder occurs. Such alteration violates the identity holding right of the copyright holder and thus cannot be left at user's disposal.